Unfortunately as we’ve seen time and time again with AMD, while their Graphics division can consistently turn a small profit, at only 1/3rd the revenue of their Computing Solutions division it’s not nearly large enough to offset the losses AMD has run there.

In Q3 of 2011 Llano was the biggest factor in AMD turning a profit, but a year later those chips have been superseded by AMD’s new Trinity APU.

We asked AMD about the removal of PCIe 3.0 support (given both families use Cape Verde, the potential is certainly there), and their response confirmed our suspicions: “The Cape Verde die itself supports PCIe 3; the reason we chose not to include it in our 7700M is because it mostly targets platforms where power saving is king, and the sacrifice (though not huge) in that regard would not have been justified by the small performance gain going from gen 2 to gen 3.

With so-called “power viruses” like OCCT and Furmark, users started encountering issues with GPUs exceeding those limits, and the results ranged from crashing to even failed hardware.